Phleem

The engine has a huge glowing maw at the back, as is entirely appropriate for a star ship engine. It just feels wrong to paste a big piece of armor over it that blocks it. Same is true of the thrusters.

Hi all, I'm enjoying the game, but the camera problems are very frustrating in combat. I'm having the same problems others describe: the camera is positioned behind my long ship, and as I pitch up and down it frequently ends up blocked by the bulk of the ship. In particular the big rectangular armor shield on the back of my ship gets in the way a lot. I couldn't stomach the immersion loss of pasting armor panels all over the engines and thrusters at the rear. I could remove the big rear panel, but I did notice the same thing on my earlier ship that was just your usual starter brick. I've used the ALT key manipulation to move the camera up, but as I do that it changes the angle to the aim point in an undesirable way. I tried adding some tall spires point up from the front and back of the ship to try to trick it into a different default position, but that didn't seem to make much difference. It would be nice of someone that is experienced in the game could write a summary of how the cope with this, both in the design of the ships to minimize the problem, where they place turrets to make them easier to aim, and in any tweaks to the camera that actually help. It is a bit surprising this problem still exists after all these years. I would have thought the developers would have been driven crazy by this and fixed it one way or another long ago, by either giving more degrees of freedom to the camera adjustment or allowing the default point to be based on a chosen ship block. Maybe they never build and fly long pointy ships?